Iowa's field of mediocrities

The candidates say it on debate stages. Voters say it at campaign rallies. It is a staple of Republican rhetoric that 2012 is the most fateful election in decades — a big and perilous moment around which national destiny will hinge.

Here’s what does not get said as often: This big moment on history’s stage is being filled by politicians who so far have looked way too small for the occasion.

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Bad manners, to be sure, to state it quite like that on Iowa caucus day. This is supposed to be an uplifting exercise, when discerning Midwestern voters inspect their choices and command the rest of the country to see new dimensions of leadership in candidates who previously seemed like ordinary pols.

But the official start of Republican voting — arriving at last after long months of speculation about who’s running and who’s not, of debates, of wild gyrations in the polls — is framed by some unmistakable paradoxes:

• Lots of evidence suggests American politics is more fluid and radicalized and impatient with the status quo than at any time in a generation. But the person regarded as the clear front-runner, Mitt Romney, is an emphatically conventional politician who, while possessed of a formidable resume, has stayed at the top mainly through a steady, plodding approach that depends heavily on the defects of his rivals.

• At a time when the make-up of the Republican Party is growing ever-more conservative and ideologically charged, Romney’s victory would represent the second consecutive time, after John McCain’s 2008 race, that the GOP nomination has gone to a center-right candidate who has demonstrated little interest in ideological crusades.

• With a clear opportunity to win the gold medal of American politics — knocking off an incumbent president — Republicans produced a field of dwarves. Romney has been the only candidate who has managed to project an aura of presidential plausibility over a sustained period of time. Yet, despite being universally known, he is not the choice of three out of four Republicans, polls show.

There have been countless flurries of excitement over the past year on the Republican side. But, in retrospect, much of it has been false drama — a series of one-act plays in which people like Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and now, maybe, Rick Santorum enjoyed turns as the person most likely to mount a real challenge to Romney and, ultimately, President Barack Obama.

But in every case so far the spotlight found more weaknesses than strengths in these politicians. The Gallup Poll identified no fewer than seven moments last year when the title of “Republican front-runner” changed hands. This frenetic movement apparently reflected a sense of impoverishment, not bounty. The pollster likened the fluid Republican race to two other election years — 1964 and 2004 — when leaderless opposition parties had agonized over their presidential nominee, before ultimately selecting a loser for the general election.

Brad Holder, 51, of Hinton, Iowa, stocks shelves overnight at a grocery store and is an undecided voter. He leans toward Rick Perry after attending his Monday event in Sioux City. But on the whole he’s unimpressed with the field.

"There are none you can single out,” he said. “They just don’t quite have the pizzazz. I don’t want to use the word dull, but they are. They don’t have that excitement.”